Negative Energy
by L.M.Lewis
Summary: The road to enlightenment runs never smooth.


Disclaimer: These are not my characters and I make no profit from them.

Thanks, Owl and Cheri.

**Author's Note**: Moving along to the second season episode "D-Day", we meet another Hardcastle relative. His deceased wife's sister, Didi Dreilinger, recently widowed, has moved back to town and is coming for dinner. The judge is in a swivet. The titular nickname refers to the woman's history of an obsessive attitude toward dirt and disorganization—including other people's. When we finally meet her, though, she seems slightly changed. Her new voyage of self-discovery has taken her into an adult-ed class on police procedure, taught by a now-famous ex-LAPD detective who's written a book that was optioned for a movie. (So why's he teaching night school? Ahh . . . never mind.) Didi has decided to trump the final project by tailing her professor and has been tracking his every move, not realizing he's also masterminding (along with his former cop partner) the theft and resale of drugs from the police impound. The judge doesn't approve of her snooping. Didi confides to her prof what she's up to and tells him he'll be amazed by her final report. He hopes not—he just killed a man a couple days earlier. Hardcastle takes an interest when Didi's apartment is ransacked. But by whom? She's annoyed _so_ many people. Her professor, not having been able to locate her surveillance tapes, passes the job along to the mobster he's dealing with, who sends two faux-poolmen to take out the judge and his sister-in-law at the estate. Mark notices something wrong (it's their leather shoes), beans one with a thrown flower pot and chases the other one down. More stuff happens until the whole thing culminates at the marina—bad guys, boat chases, mayhem, and some dusting.

This is shortly after the scene in which Didi, close to a breakdown after the Attack of the Faux-Pool Guys, has to be talked into staying by Hardcastle—

**Negative Energy**

by L.M. Lewis

Mark was frowning, shading his eyes, staring down into the pool. The pot was there, in three pieces, resting on the bottom of the deep end. The dirt was mostly settled out too, and had formed a long, sinuous band on the bottom, shaped by the currents of the inadequate filtering system.

The flowers he'd scraped out of the gutters, where they'd ended up like flotsam and jetsam from a sinking ship. There were still plenty of petals, he was sure, already making their way into the system and clogging up the fragile filters.

He sighed. It'd be two more days before the real pool guy—the one who didn't ordinarily carry a shotgun—got here to straighten things out. He supposed _somebody_ would have to do something about it, and—as Kemosabe had so succinctly put it the other night at dinner—mostly around Gull's Way that meant McCormick.

He was turning to head for the pool equipment shed when he saw her, standing on the patio draped in a sweater, holding her arms folded in a half-hug around herself.

"He threw you out, too?" Mark smiled.

He was pleased to get a small smile in return. "Not exactly. But he said he needed to think."

"Hmm," Mark said. "That's usually how it is. He's thinking about who we should annoy enough to shoot at us next."

For a moment he thought he'd pushed it a little too hard but, no, her smile had become less tentative. It helped, he supposed, that everything he'd said so far was God's honest truth.

He stepped over to the storage area, pulling his key ring out and working the padlock, then reaching in and setting a couple of Hardcastle's spare pieces aside—they weren't really all that handy way over here, not when the pool guys got feisty. He finally got down to the even more rarely-used pool-vac and dragged it out.

She'd wandered closer, he noticed. Any cleaning project seemed to draw her in—moth to flame.

"I'll need the net, too." He pointed to the sunken pieces of pottery and then to the device, hanging on the back wall.

"Oh," she said, a bit more brightly, releasing her shoulders and making for it with quick steps. "I can do that."

"Wait, though. Don't want to stir up the mud." He got the vacuum to the pool's edge, safely plugged in at the properly distanced outlet, and lowered it, with infinite care, toward his quarry.

She joined him at the side, net now in hand. He caught a glance of her, raptly attentive as he maneuvered the end of the thing into just the right position before finally flipping the switch. With obvious mutual satisfaction they watched the eddied mud pulled upward, mostly contained, into the machine.

"_Very_ nicely done, Mark." She'd tucked the pole of the net under her elbow to free her hands for a couple of quick claps. He chased the end of the pile down and let it have a good long transit time up the tube before turning the machine off and ducking his chin in a modest bow.

"Practice," he said, hauling the vac in hand-over-hand and laying it out on the concrete deck.

"Earlier," she asked, suddenly more serious, "that, too?"

He supposed she meant the fairly off-handed throw that had taken out the one would-be assassin and landed the pot in the pool. That had been dumb luck as far as he could tell, though he did that kind of stuff on the spur of the moment and afterward it was hard to sort it all out.

But he also realized there was such a thing as revealing too many secrets, and he didn't want her more worried than she already was, so he merely shrugged. It could be interpreted as just modesty, if she were so inclined, but would at least give the illusion that it hadn't been a fluke.

It must've worked. She was still smiling, just a little uncertainly, as she unshipped the net. He held out one hand and she reluctantly gave up possession. "You're the expert," she conceded.

"With this, definitely." He grinned, whipping it down to snag all three pieces in one pass.

She sighed, and he suspected it wasn't with more admiration as he gathered his haul in toward the gutter, trying not to tear the net.

He was right. Her next words were, "All this," there was a vague gesture toward the scene of the recent crime, "you must have thought I sounded a little foolish with my adult education courses. 'Chinese wok cooking'," she parodied her former earnestness and shook her head in obvious disgust.

"Nah," Mark said, fishing the last piece out of the net and setting it on top of the others, "not really. I took a class in basket-weaving once."

She was giving him a disbelieving stare, as though she thought he might be mocking her.

"No, _really_," he said, "split-ash Amish basket-weaving. You know how they split the ash, don't ya?" he asked, and then without waiting added, "They cut down the tree, then hit the trunk with a mallet until it separates along the growth rings. Perfect splits." Having shared this he felt obligated to add, "Of course we didn't get to do that part. Though some of the guys might've been pretty good with mallets."

Didi's mouth had formed a little 'oh' of understanding. "In _prison_," she said mildly, as if it all made perfect sense now.

"Um-hmm." Mark scanned the bottom of the pool one last time, looking for any stray detritus and, seeing none, gave a sharp nod of satisfaction.

"But why did you take it?" Didi asked. "The basket-weaving, I mean."

"Oh, well," Mark confided, "I only had one rule about stuff like that: 'Always sit with your back to a wall.'" He quoted himself with some solemnity, as though it were one of life's more immutable and profound lessons.

Her smile broadened just briefly, and then she glanced back behind them and it faded again as she pointed out, "It didn't help much today."

"Sure it did," Mark gestured broadly. "No one snuck up behind us, did they?"

She had to give him that much. He was grinning.

"So how was basket weaving?" she asked, still sounding genuinely curious.

"Pretty interesting, actually," Mark had to admit. "The guy who taught it had picked it up in Amish country. Then he'd spent some time up in Canada, with the Hutterites. He'd come down to Marin County to start an ashram."

"But instead he was teaching adult-ed in San Quentin?"

"Well," Mark conceded, "turned out the property taxes on the place were eating them alive. They finally had to incorporate and sell off some of the land for condos, and that was only a temporary fix." He shook his head. "But he could still turn a good profit on the buttocks egg baskets."

"I'm not sure I want to ask—"

"That always got a big laugh at Q," Mark conceded cheerfully. "You have to know your audience."

She was more relaxed now, caught up in the reminiscence which, he granted, could sound pretty tame with just the right slant on things. But he wasn't sure the present situation called for exactly that.

"And eventually," he conceded, "one of the guys in the class figured out how to ply a couple layers of splints with flour paste, press 'em, dry 'em, and sharpen the whole thing into a pretty decent non-metallic shiv."

"'Shiv'?"

"Knife. One-use disposable in this case, and the proto-type was disposed of in a Crip's back over in 'A' Block, if memory serves." Mark sighed. "So I never got to finish my fruit basket." He shrugged casually. "And thus ended another experiment in self-discovery. You can't win them all."

Didi looked slightly stunned. It took a moment before she collected herself and then she said, "I think I get it. Wait a second." She paused, wrinkling her brow, even her nose, in concentration. "Things could always be worse. _No_," she corrected. "Things _are_ worse, right now. For lots of people. And, um, keep your back to the wall."

Mark looked impressed. "All that from one shiv?"

"I took a course in say-back and amplification."

"For real?" Mark asked.

"No," Didi smiled slyly, "but it sounds pretty good, doesn't it?" Her smile faded again slowly. "But I think the part about keeping your back to the wall is the take-home lesson here, isn't it?"

"Yeah, maybe," Mark cocked his head, "but a really sharp guy told me a little while back that it didn't apply anymore—my back couldn't be against the wall because he was behind me."

Didi wasn't smiling at all now. He wasn't sure what that meant for a moment, and then she said, slow and mostly certain, "For me too, huh?"

He barely had time to nod before a bellowing voice cut into their tête-à-tête.

"_McCormick_?"

The man himself came lumbering through the now-open kitchen door and thumped down the steps. He surveyed the project with a quick cursory glance. "You almost done here?"

Mark nodded, handing the net over to Didi with the flourish worthy of Quixote's lance. "What next?"

"Next—" Hardcastle set his lips for a moment, as though he couldn't quite believe the conclusion he'd drawn for himself. "Next I think we should take a better gander at Ira Tratter."

"The beloved professor, best-selling author, and former star of the LAPD?" Mark said with blithe astonishment. "You sure we shouldn't stick with the rogue Girl Scouts?"

"Come on, you." Hardcastle gestured with a scowl. "Saddle up."

Mark shrugged and stepped forward, toward driveway and garage, with one quick glance over his shoulder and a wave good-bye to Didi.

"Stay inside. Doors locked," the judge admonished her. "We're just going to run down to the station and look some stuff up."

"Just fish out a couple of pieces and suck up some dirt," Mark added with only slightly less certainty, having been down this road to enlightenment before. "All in a day's work."


End file.
